the times higher education world university rankings 2010

8/7/2019 The Times Higher Education World University Rankings 2010

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The Times Higher Education World University Rankings 2010-11 were developed in concert with new

rankings data provider, Thomson Reuters, with input from more than 50 leading figures in the sector

from 15 countries across every continent, and through 10 months of extensive consultation to

represent the most accurate picture of global higher education.

This ranking of the top universities across the globe employ 13 separate performance indicators

designed to capture the full range of university activities, from teaching to research to knowledge

transfer. These 13 elements are brought together into five headline categories, which are:

y

Teaching the learning environment (worth 30 per cent of the overall ranking score)

y

Research volume, income and reputation (worth 30 per cent)

y

C itations research influence (worth 32.5 per cent)

y

Industry income innovation (worth 2.5 per cent)

y

International mix staff and students (worth 5 per cent).

RANKINGS: THE METHODOLOGY


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CRITERIA

THE QS WORLD UNIVERSITYRANKINGS

QS.COM ASIAN UNIVERSITYRANKINGS

INDICATOR WEIGHT INDICATOR WEIGHT

RESEARCH QUALITY

GLOBAL ACADEMIC PEERREVIEW

40%ASIAN ACADEMIC PEER REVIEW

(ACADEMICS WITH KNOWLEDGE OFRESEARCH IN ASIAN INSTITUTIONS)

30%

CITATIONS PER FA CULTY 20% PAPERS PER FA CULTY 15%

CITATIONS PER PAPER 15%

TEACHING QUALITYSTUDENT FACULTY

RATIO20% STUDENT FA CULTY RATIO 20%

GRADUATEEMPLOYABILITY

GLOBAL EMPLOYERREVIEW

10%

ASIAN EMPLOYER REVIEW

(EMPLOYERS WITH EXPERIENC E OFRECRUITING FROM ASIAN

INSTITUTIONS)

10%

INTERNATIONALISATION

INTERNATIONALFACULTY

5% INTERNATIONAL FACULTY 2.5%

INTERNATIONALSTUDENTS

5% INTERNATIONAL STUDENTS 2.5%

INBOUND EXCHANGE STUDENTS 2.5%

OUTBOUND EXCHANGE STUDENTS 2.5%

WEIGHTING SCHEME FOR RANKING SCORES

Industry income innovation (2.5%)

This category is designed to cover an institution's knowledge-transfer activity. Just a single indicator

determines it: a simple figure giving an institution's research income from industry scaled against the

number of academic staff . It suggests the extent to which users are prepared to pay for research and a

university's ability to attract funding in the commercial marketplace which are significant indicators

of quality. However, because the figures provided by institutions for this indicator were patchy, it has

been given relatively low weighting for the 2010-11 tables: it is worth just 2.5 per cent of the overall

ranking score.


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Teaching the learning environment (30%)

This broad category employs five separate indicators designed to provide a clear sense of the teaching

and learning environment of each institution, from both the student and academic perspective. The

flagship indicator for this category uses the results of a reputational survey on teaching . Thomson

Reuters carried out its Academic Reputation Survey a worldwide poll of experienced scholars in

spring 2010. It examined the perceived prestige of institutions in both research and teaching. There

were 13,388 responses, statistically representative of global higher education's geographical and

subject mix. The results of the survey with regard to teaching make up 50 per cent of the score in the

broad teaching environment category, and 15 per cent of the overall rankings score.

This broad category also measures the number of undergraduates admitted by an institution scaled

against the number of academic staff . Essentially a form of staff-to-student ratio , this measure is

employed as a proxy for teaching quality suggesting that where there is a low ratio of students to

staff, the former will get the personal attention they require from the institution's faculty. As this

measure serves as only a crude proxy, and our consultation exposed some concerns about its use, it

receives a relatively low weighting: it is worth 15 per cent of the teaching category and just 4.5 per

cent of the overall ranking scores, which contrasts with the 20 per cent weighting the measure was

given in our previous rankings .

The teaching category also examines the ratio of PhD to bachelor's degrees awarded by each

institution. We believe that institutions with a high density of research students are more knowledge-

intensive, and that the presence of an active postgraduate community is a marker of a research-led

teaching environment valued by undergraduates and postgraduates alike. The PhD-bachelor's ratio

receives a 7.5 per cent weighting in its category and is worth 2.25 per cent of the overall ranking

scores. The teaching category also uses data on the number of PhDs awarded by an institution, scaled

against its size as measured by the number of academic staff.

As well as giving a sense of how committed an institution is to nurturing the next generation of

academics, a high proportion of postgraduate research students also suggests teaching at the highest

level that is attractive to graduates and good at developing them.


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Undergraduate students also tend to value working in a rich environment that includes postgraduates.

Worth 20 per cent of the teaching environment category, this indicator makes up 6 per cent of the

overall score.

The final indicator in this category is a simple measure of institutional income scaled against academic

staff numbers.

This figure, adjusted for purchasing-price parity so that all nations compete on a level playing field,

indicates the general status of an institution and gives a broad sense of the general infrastructure and

facilities available to students and staff.

This measure is worth 7.5 per cent of the category and 2.25 per cent overall.

C itations research influence

A university's research influence as measured by the number of times its published work is cited by

academics is the largest of the broad rankings categories, worth just under a third of the overall

score.

This weighting reflects the relatively high level of confidence the global academic community has in the

indicator as a proxy for research quality.

The use of citations to indicate quality is controversial their use in distributing more than 1.5 billion

a year in UK research funding under the forthcoming research excellence framework, for example, has

been dramatically scaled back after lengthy consultation.

Nevertheless, there is clear evidence of a strong correlation between citation counts and research

performance.

The data are drawn from the 12,000 academic journals indexed by Thomson Reuters' Web of Science

database. The figures are collected for every university, with data aggregated over a five-year period

from 2004 to 2008 (there has been insufficient time for the accumulation of such data for articles

published in 2009 and 2010).

Unlike the approach employed by the old rankings system, all the citations impact data are normalised

to reflect variations in citation volume between different subject areas. This means that institutions

with high levels of research activity in subjects with traditionally very high citation counts will no longer

gain an unfair advantage.

Research volume, income and reputation

As with the teaching category, the most prominent indicator in research volume, income and

reputation is based on the results of our reputational survey.


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C onsultation with our expert advisers suggested that confidence in this indicator was higher than in the

teaching reputational survey, as academics are likely to be more knowledgeable about the reputation

of research departments in their specialist fields. For this reason, it is given a higher weighting: it is

worth 65 per cent here and 19.5 per cent of the overall score.

Some 17.5 per cent of this category 5.25 per cent of the overall ranking is determined by a

university's research income, scaled against staff numbers and normalised for purchasing-power parity.

This is a controversial measure, as it can be influenced by national policy and economic circumstances.

But research income is crucial to the development of world-class research, and because much of it is

subject to competition and judged by peer review, our experts suggested it was a valid measure.

The research environment category also includes a simple measure of research volume scaled against

staff numbers. We count the number of papers published in the academic journals indexed by

Thomson Reuters per staff member, giving an idea of an institution's ability to get papers published in

quality peer-reviewed journals. This indicator is worth 15 per cent of the category and 4.5 per cent

overall.

Some 2.5 per cent of the category worth just 0.75 per cent overall is a measure of public research

income against an institution's total research income. This has a low weighting to reflect concerns

about the comparability of self-reported data between countries.

International mix staff and students

Our final category looks at diversity on campus a sign of how global an institution is in its outlook.

The ability of a university to attract the very best staff from across the world is key to global success. So

in this category we give a 60 per cent weighting to the ratio of international to domestic staff, making

up 3 per cent of the overall score.

The market for academic and administrative jobs is international in scope, and this indicator suggests

global competitiveness. However, as it is a relatively crude proxy, and as geographical considerations

can influence performance, the weighting has been reduced from the 5 per cent used under our old

rankings system.

The other indicator in this category is based on the ratio of international to domestic students. Again,

this is a sign of an institution's global competitiveness and its commitment to globalisation. As with the

staff indicator, our consultation revealed concerns about the inability to gauge the quality of students

and the problems caused by geography and tuition-fee regimes. So the measure receives a 40 per cent

weighting and is worth 2 per cent of the final score.


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C itation impact: it's all relative

C itations are widely recognised as a strong indicator of the significance and relevance that is, the

impact of a piece of research.

However, citation data must be used with care as citation rates can vary between subjects and time

periods.

For example, papers in the life sciences tend to be cited more frequently than those published in the

social sciences.

The rankings this year use normalised citation impact, where the citations to each paper are compared

with the average number of citations received by all papers published in the same field and year. So a

paper with a relative citation impact of 2.0 is cited twice as frequently as the average for similar

papers.

The data were extracted from the Thomson Reuters resource known as Web of Science, the largest

and most comprehensive database of research citations available.

Its authoritative and multidisciplinary content covers more than 11,600 of the highest-impact journals

worldwide. The benchmarking exercise is carried out on an exact level across 251 subject areas for

each year in the period 2004 to 2008.

For institutions that produce few papers, the relative citation impact may be significantly influenced by

one or two highly cited papers and therefore it does not accurately reflect their typical performance.

However, institutions publishing fewer than 50 papers a year have been excluded from the rankings.

There are occasions where a groundbreaking academic paper is so influential as to drive the citation

counts to extreme levels receiving thousands of citations. An institution that contributes to one of

these papers will receive a significant and noticeable boost to its citation impact, and this reflects such

institutions' contribution to globally significant research projects.

To calculate the overall ranking score, "Z-scores" were created for all datasets. This standardises the

different data types on a common scale and allows fair comparisons between the different types of

data which is essential when combining diverse information into a single ranking.

Each data point is given a score based on its distance from the average (mean) of the entire dataset,

where the scale is the standard deviation of the dataset. The Z-score is then turned into a "cumulative

probability score" to give the final totals. A cumulative probability score indicates for any real value

what the probability is that a normally distributed random value will fall below that point.


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For example, if University X has a score of 98, then a random institution from the same distribution of

data will fall below this university 98 per cent of the time.

The overall top 200 ranking and the six tables showing the top 50 institutions by subject were based on

criteria and weightings that were carefully selected after extensive consultation. All of them drew on

the exceptionally rich data set by THE where they recognize that different people have different

interests and priorities and to allow everyone to make the most of our data and gain a personalised

view of global higher education, the tables on this site can be fully manipulated and sorted. With this

feature, users may rank institutions by their performance in any one of the five broad headline

categories to create bespoke tables or make regional comparisons via our area analyses.

Exclusions

Universities were excluded from the World University Rankings tables if they do not teach

undergraduates; if their research output amounts to less than 50 articles per year; or if they teach only

a single narrow subject.

Data sign-off

Each institution listed in these rankings opted in to the exercise and verified its institutional data.

Where institutions did not provide data in a particular area (which occurred in only some very low-

weighted areas), the column has been left blank.

A very important principle of the new Times Higher Education World University Rankings in the first

year of a brand new system is that all universities that we list have actively cooperated with the system

and signed off their data. The rankings are designed to be a useful and rigorous tool for the global

higher education community, and we are delighted that the vast majority of universities around the

world have embraced this exercise and have actively participated. Unfortunately after repeated

invitations to participate in the Global Institutional Profiles Project and World University Ranking by e-

mail and telephone by Thomson Reuters, some institutions did not respond, and therefore could not

be included. Some also declined to participate.


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Reputational surveys

A worldwide Academic Reputation Survey was carried out during spring 2010. Some 13,388 responses

were gathered across all regions and subject areas. The results make up a total of 34.5 per cent of the

overall ranking score (15 per cent for teaching and 19.5 per cent for research).

the times higher education world university rankings 2010

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